What is Crystal written in?
What Crystal is used for
Crystal offers Ruby-like syntax with static typing and native compilation, aimed at developers who want Ruby's productivity with much higher performance.
Notable use: web APIs and tools where teams want Ruby ergonomics without the runtime cost.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Ary Borenzweig and Manas Technology Solutions
- First released
- 2014
- Typing
- static
- License
- Apache Software License 2.0
- Filename extension
- .cr
- Website
- crystal-lang.org
About Crystal
Crystal is a programming language. It is a statically typed and garbage-collected language that compiles ahead of time to native machine code. It supports object-oriented and imperative programming.
Crystal first appeared in 2014. Development is led by Ary Borenzweig and Manas Technology Solutions. Crystal is now used mainly in specialized niches and by dedicated communities.
How Crystal is implemented
In the Language Lineage dataset, Crystal is self-hosting, so its own compiler is written in Crystal itself and its toolchain was bootstrapped from Ruby. Reaching self-hosting, where a language is mature enough to compile itself, is a milestone that proves the language can handle a large, real-world program.
Crystal in the language family tree
Crystal drew on ideas from Ruby and Go.
Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata · Official site
Frequently Asked Questions
Evidence Sources
- https://crystal-lang.org/
- https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_(programming_language)
- Crystal on Wikidata (Q21921428)